JusticeZero

Had the TKD kids in class again. Now I need to figure out a larger variety of ways to address the annoying comment "That's not how we do it in TKD." I also need to figure out ways to deal with varying levels of skill better. Vidro does a lot of the lines very slowly and deliberately, playing with balance and technique, pushing the envelope, and falling down a lot; one of the TKD kids also has little background in body movement, and has difficulty with movement. Two of the TKD kids are breakdancers by hobby, and once they grasp a movement (or, at least, THINK they grasp it) they blow down the line in seconds. Routine was the usual stretch kicks and stretch twists, then evasions flowing into floor movements *without moving the feet* (this part throws people; you should be able to do many of your transitions in place), then some sweeping work. Then one of the TKD kids - the same one who was smart-aleck stepping out of a takedown a few days ago, I think? started trying to tell me that my spinning kick was easy to stop by blocking the leg. Well, duh, you can disrupt ANY technique, even a boxing jab; I showed them a few places on their TKD kicks where the kick could be disrupted. "Yeah, but I can switch to this other thing if they do that..." and here is two or three things that I can change the original kick to if it is stopped. Then some comment of how the crescent kick I was teaching was easy to block with a circular block. "Here, hold this heavy kicking shield like you were doing a circular block." *KERPOW!!!* "Remember, I have bare feet right now. Normally, I train or practice this in shoes. That means you're blocking that plus the weight of my shoe, and i'm probably hitting in part with the side of the sole. I can adjust the angle if I think you're going to stick your elbow out." This led in to, in a similar vein shortly afterward, "You like doing those nifty shoulder rolls. Have you ever tried doing one on pavement? How about rough pavement? Or gravel?" After the TKD kids left, me and my usual students went out and did, in fact, practice some of our Cap type tumbling on the pavement. I want to do that more, but the traffic blows the young one's concentration out the door. I will admit to being a bit cranky about the mats. Two toenails were lost to that mat on Thursday, in their entirety; one was mine. We were in no way doing anything unusual which might cause it. I HATE the mats.

The patterns are a library of forms and, possibly more importantly, transitions between techniques. It's the way the movements connect together in some form of tactical context that is often the important part. That's what the forms do.

If it IS a serious sprain, use cold (not icy, but chilly) to keep the swelling down, then keep it warm. Keep all weight off of it, and gently wiggle it a bit - not 'grab it and move it', but 'try to move it - but not much, or fast' - whenever you can; it helps it heal faster.

Class had three adults in it; for the most part it was a rerun of the last one, but instead of the acrobatics, I covered tactics: The importance of escape, the importance of directly controlling your attacker and the onlookers, and the value of girly screaming combined with a frightened expression and falling down as part of your technique so that (as Vidro put it) "-THEY- are going to go to the hospital or jail, but YOU are going to go home and play on your X-Box because YOU weren't fighting, as far as anyone watching was concerned."

Very little if any. I end up knowing some vague amount of current gossip just in listening to it in between things I actually care about in conversation with people from other arts.

Lack of positional awareness, or adding in pointless flowery acrobatic movements with no thought to what their opponent was doing, or disregard to the format of the roda, would all be non-passes for me if it came to it.

I ride a bike, because I consciously got rid of my car. I don't want to *jog* five plus miles carrying a hundred pounds of this and that, but I have no trouble swinging by a bulk store on my way home from the studio four miles away and picking up a 20 pound bag of pet food and two cases of canned goods to carry on my longtail bicycle.

I'd start by getting them hooked on proper body mechanics. 'This is what it feels like to get hit with a kick chambered that way - hold this shield - *thump*.. and this is what it's like to get hit with it if you chamber it up here.. *KERPOW!!! (crash of student hitting the back wall) *.. any questions? Pair up with the heeeavvy shields and practice your kicking.'

It wouldn't surprise me if they could look at all that with optical telescopes, though.

Had a bunch of kids from the TKD class that I sublet the space from drop in, by instruction from their instructor. Meia lua de frente (crescent kick from horse stance) down the room, this was for a sequence that when I learned, would be considered very easy and which confused everyone, even Vidro, my older student. So, I abandoned it as a wash, i'll try later when I have an older mix. Ginga, cocorinha, resistencia, negativa, role; this is a basic sequence that covers transitions from standing to floor and back; then several lines of negativa and role - floor stance and rolling over step from previous - across the room in various ways. Chapa (mule kick from the floor), Martelo do Chao (spinning roundhouse kick from the floor), briefly; then role across the floor using slow chapa to tap paired partners' feet together down the line. Next, improvised movement on the floor with partners; had them crawling and twisting around watching each other. As per usual, finished with some lines of movement. Took a couple of minutes to show students tips on how to do handstands and a body spin. Break.. Ginga in pairs, synching movement between partners; use of a backward slip to move laterally by a big step; stepping forward by slinging the foot forward reaching, both full around and with foot exchange, which led to Vingativa practice, a throw that many find very effective against people which use side stances and which, when done with anything resembling proper form, is startlingly smooth and low-power; step behind someone (the reason for the steps), and turn the body to bring the arm over the knee. Paired movement; one person stands and stays pointed toward the other, while the other uses all the movement they can to twist around the first. Every few seconds, switch places. If the person moving turns away from their partner, the partner claps at them to indicate an attack. Closed up early because everyone was mentally exhausted by then.

Some of them DO practice, quite a bit. It's just that they practice by doing it sloppily and wrong. Some basic movements I insert what amounts to an extra stop in in an exaggerated intermediary position, in your case, where the chamber is, so that the extra stop pulls it into a more tight form when it is done "lazily".

Just regular dust might work for that too.. used to scuff my feet in the dust pile from sweeping before class so that I wouldn't blister, way back when I was doing regional and thus training barefoot.

Conditioning: Had a second small student for the day. Went through basic kicks and floor movements, assuring the second person that they weren't actually expected to do the movements perfectly. New kick, a variant of mea lua de compasso from and parking in a different stance. After the break, everyone had processed various things and they split up while I was still changing to start working on their own drills that they felt weakest in; I came in and let them continue awhile offering feedback. Afterward, had people paired up and in jogo in an area constrained by four standing bags. Stopped people several times to try to break their habit of doing a back esquiva too often and with no followthrough. New exercise: In order to build form and strength for leg scissors, students put socks on then pushed themselves across the puzzle mats across the room on their hands, looking between their legs as their feet slid in front of them.

Who the man has a romantic relationship with has zero relevance to a place where he goes to learn a skill which has no direct bearing on his romantic life. He is there to learn a skill.

One of the people in this video is almost completely blind as of when the video was taken; it's one of those 'gets progressively worse' things. Hint: They're not one of the beginner players shown. http://www.whatsontv.co.uk/youtube/search/light%20dependant/video/QstxwIu7YPM/1 They've gone on and last I heard, they were teaching a class.

The question was between high skill and low fitness vs. low skill and high fitness. If the athlete has comparable experience then they are high skill and high fitness, and so can't be compared to the person who has low fitness; they have equal skill and the sum is different. The point is that the person who is high skill and low fitness has, in my experience, always managed to have more actual endurance and usually stronger power generation than the person who has not developed skill in favor of developing physical conditioning. It's like comparing a compact car with 40 mpg to a huge truck that gets 5 mpg, and saying that "The truck will OBVIOUSLY go a lot farther; it holds five times as much fuel!" If skill is comparable, the one with better conditioning is going to win. If skill is NOT comparable, then the skill will accomplish the same things that the fitness would have, plus add some tactical awareness and ability that the fit person could not develop by cardio and strength building alone.

Thursday: Structure, structure, structure! We had someone in who had lots osmall issues with pain in everyday life; I know this person. Added in a number of exercizes as intermediate stretches to force people to WALK correctly, ie on the balls of the feet rather than lunging onto the heel. These helped the pain almost immediately. Stepping onto the hands: Many reps of entering a handstand, concentrating on the initial small fall onto the hands and how to shift the balance in that stage. Lines of kicks, cartwheels paired up.

Sure, but if I take a poorly conditioned couch potato with a year of training in proper form and structure, and throw them in the ring with an athlete with excellent cardio who runs 5 miles every day, the couch potato will slam the athlete into the ground on SHEER ENDURANCE ALONE. The athlete will gas out and be exhausted and the couch potato will still have endurance to spare.

Sure; you have to train to beat them, too. You won't do it by going head to head.

Yes; I -am- an 'overweight instructor', in spite of eating decently healthy, practicing regularly, and going everywhere on a bicycle for extra exercize. I can do all sorts of stuff that people who don't have any form of weight issue can't dream of, and it's the skill people are looking for; not whether I can flex and look like an action figure. In truth, if I have spent too much time worrying about building up strength, it is an indication that I am missing the point of the art; I have my skill so that I can do things when my fitness is gone. There will always be someone stronger, and strength can be taken from me by so many things. it's like saying that you don't need martial arts because you have a gun, even though you often don't have the gun on hand. Your fitness won't be there when you need it either.

Maybe.. but without skill, your fitness won't go very far.

Well, people talk about 'gaining confidence'.. You gain confidence by having been tested, and having had your comfort level shoved hard out of bounds. When a challenge comes up, you want to say "You know, i've had a nastier challenge before, and I managed it; this is going to be easy.." rather than "Oh no, I don't know if I can handle this!" You should be able to know that you've dealt with multiple attackers and combat that runs until quite a bit after your fitness is knocked flat. A woman is MORE likely to need to have that confidence than a man will, really.

Heh. I'm going to have to agree with your sensei here. Strength and power is fleeting, and in the end it will leave you. Furthermore, if you have skill, it will lessen your need for fitness. It is the imperfections in form that fatigue me and my students; if you have good form, your need for fitness will be minor as you will be using your strength very efficiently. If your form is poor, you will need herculean fitness to power your way through your own poor form and structure, and the advantage will be burned through to no real gain. Then one day you will get sick, or be tired, and you will have.. 20% fitness and 20% skill.

Front crescent kick; importance of beginning and ending each movement in a solid and deep stance. Introduced them to the joy that is Alphabets. This exercise has students standing on one leg writing the alphabet in the air with the toes of their other foot. A-Z on each leg. I can do the entire alphabet without putting my foot down. Some philosophy was brought up, not by me; correct movement is both easy and intuitively simple once the principles on which they are built are understood. When the movement is done correctly, they will tire less and ache far less.

Lots of armada (360 spin kick) today. Particularly, I was focusing on the necessity of and dynamics of "parking" the kick, that is, returning in a strong manner to a solid stance at the end of the kick. Armada is one in which parking is important; it is meaningless to enter with a solid kick and fire the kick with power and speed and structure, only to sloppily stumble out of the kick afterward, wasting time and opportunities to act in doing so. As such, I had them do a number of reps of the kick where the kick ended in an exaggerated esquiva position rather than merely back to ginga, necessitating a much deeper and more solid structure. This necessitated some explanation and demonstration of the structure in question.. All of this was aided by a heat wave, somewhere around 90 F, and there was no A/C in sight. Lots of reps in that heat tires one out quickly, and when tired, one can't be bothered to waste energy on form mistakes. Kicking form improved dramatically! Whether it stays improved remains to be seen.